Cecil Henry Floyd was born in 1941. The killings he was convicted of were all committed during robberies, in Indiana, Nebraska and Kansas, in 1973 and 1974, and the amounts taken were small.
Henry Maser was hitchhiking near Lebanon, Indiana in 1973 when Floyd and two men he was travelling with stopped and picked him up. He was shot dead, and his killer took five dollars.
Floyd was arrested a short time later over an armed robbery in Arkansas. Indiana was notified, and while he was in custody on the robbery charge he confessed to the hitchhiker's murder. He was sentenced to life in Indiana on June 10, 1975 and has been in the state prison at Michigan City ever since.
He was then handed to the authorities in Hamilton County, Nebraska, where he was convicted of murdering Lester Schmidt in July 1974 and given a second life sentence. Schmidt was a filling station attendant; Floyd shot him three times in the head, took the cash register and left.
Three days after the Nebraska killing a man was murdered at Abilene, Kansas. Floyd eventually pleaded guilty to that as well.
In April 1998 Florida moved to extradite him on three counts of murder in Orange County. Those killings had happened between November 1973 and May 1974, and one of the victims, Karen Chitwood, had been stabbed and slashed with a knife.
He appeared before Judge Robert Gilmore of the LaPorte Circuit Court on April 15, 1998, in a yellow prison uniform and shackles, a reporter noting his thin and wrinkled body and his drawl, and waived extradition. He said they had got him cold turkey, that he would get the death penalty if he fought it, and that to him the warrant said he was going regardless. Anyone convicted of first degree murder in Florida is eligible for a death sentence there.
Indiana's position was that he belonged to Indiana. The commissioner of the Department of Correction said that even a Florida death sentence would not give Florida ultimate control of him: he was an Indiana inmate serving life, and Indiana would expect him back to continue that sentence. A prison spokesman said that two life terms meant he could not be paroled in Indiana at all, while the commissioner said the position was less clear than that and it was possible he could be paroled and handed to Florida.
The count of six is three convictions in three states and three further charges in Florida. Whether the Florida prosecutions ever came to trial is not in the accessible record, and neither is whether he is still alive. A widely used reference work gives his second life sentence as Nevada, which is an error for Nebraska.